(Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-19-515297-2)

A Review Essay by Wilson Eliot Poindexter

Editor's note: The following was originally published inSophia(Volume 11, No. 1, Summer 2005)

Réné Guénon, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt and other writers associated with the Traditional school represent an important yet understudied dimension of 20th century intellectual history. Many studies of Guénon have been published in French and secondary literature on Frithjof Schuon has been on the rise over the last five years. Nonetheless, a critical academic treatment of the Traditional school and the Perennial Philosophy so closely intertwined with it is still lacking, especially in the English-speaking world. Against the Modern World would thus appear to be an essential contribution, helping to fill this academic lacuna. But it is in fact a step in the wrong direction, serving more to obfuscate than to clarify.

The author does not grasp the core elements of Tradition and never provides a satisfactory definition. In his one attempt to define Tradition, he writes:

The word “tradition” derives from the Latin verb tradere, to hand over or to hand down, and in an etymological sense a tradition is “a statement, belief or practice transmitted (especially orally) from generation to generation.”[1] The Traditionalist movement with which this book deals takes “tradition” primarily in this sense, as belief and practice transmitted from time immemorialor rather belief and practice that should have been transmitted but was lost to the West during the last half of the second millennium A.D. (22)

This definition fails to recognize that “Tradition represents doctrines about first principles, which do not change.” (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Correspondence, 1946)[2] Being based upon “first principles”, all Traditions referred to by Guénon, Coomaraswamy and others are of a religious nature, and the sine qua non of Tradition is that it be firmly rooted in divine revelation. Perhaps the best definition of Tradition is that provided by S. H. Nasr in Knowledge and the Sacred, the most “academic” presentation of Traditional teachings:

Tradition as used in its technical sense in this work, as in all our other writings, means truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic sector through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies, along with all the ramifications and applications of these principles in different realms including law and social structure, art symbolism, the sciences, and embracing of course Supreme Knowledge along with the means for its attainment.[3]

Thus Tradition is always used with a view to the meta-historical transcendent Truth that is believed to be at the heart of all religions. Indeed, this metaphysical aspect of Tradition is its central and defining element. As Réné Guénon writes:

...there is nothing and can be nothing truly traditional that does not contain some element of a super-human order. This indeed is the essential point, containing as it were the very definition of tradition and all that appertains to it.[4]

There may be many definitions of “Tradition”, but the author does not accurately represent the definition employed by those he proposes to study. As a result he is never able to grasp the central technical terms of their discourse, and those terms he does employ are poorly defined.

This lack of clarity is of great importance for the use of the term “traditionalist”. Although “traditionalist” and “traditionalism” are now used and accepted by followers of Guénon, he himself applied the term to those who did not yet understand “Tradition”, maintaining that “traditionalists” are

… people who only have a sort of tendency or aspiration toward tradition without really knowing anything at all about it; this is the measure of the distance dividing the “traditionalist” spirit from the truly traditional spirit, . . . In short, the “traditionalist” is and can be no more than a mere “seeker”, and that is why he is always in danger of going astray, not being in possession of the principles which alone could provide him with infallible guidance . . .”[5]

Thus for Guénon, the ability to understand true principles is what distinguishes a true Traditional scholar from a mere “traditionalist”. Having missed this critical point, the author is not able to understand the central focus of Guénon’s projectrebuilding tradition by returning to pure transcendent principles. In turn, he fails to understand that Guénon was opposed to nothing other than the absence of such principles, which for him characterizes modern Western civilization. As Guénon expresses it: “The modern civilization suffers from a lack of principles, and it suffers from it in every domain; by a monstrous anomaly, it is, alone among all others, a civilization without principles.”[6]

Guénon maintained that once metaphysical principles are renewed among an intellectual elite, then tradition and religion can be renewed:

Thus a return to tradition and a return to principles are in reality just one and the same thing; but clearly the knowledge of the principles, where it is lost, must first be restored before there can be even a remote thought of applying them.[7]

Guénon did not “clearly dismiss” people not qualified for this elite as the author maintains (27). Rather, he believed that the reinstitution of principles would provide benefits for all of humanity by allowing every domain of life to be rooted in eternal truths rather than transient fantasies. As Guénon writes:

The purely intellectual task, which must first of all be fulfilled, is then really the first in every respect, being at the same time the most necessary and the most important, since on it everything depends and from it everything is derived; but when we use this phrase “metaphysical knowledge,” there are very few indeed, among the westerners of to-day, who have even the vaguest suspicion of all that it implies.[8]

Who is a Traditionalist?

Failing to grasp the essential religious and moreover metaphysical nature of the Traditional school, the author portrays it as an anti-modern movement rather than a pro-religious movement. As a result, he devotes the entire book to peripheral aspects of the Traditionalist movement, never grasping the core teachings. This approach leads him to confuse Traditional thinkers and non-traditional anti-modernists who exhibit familiarity with Traditional writings. As a result of this confusion, he expands his definition of Traditionalist to a “person forming part of the movement deriving from René Guénon, or of a movement deriving from that movement.”[emphasis added] This is so vast as to provide no clarity or precision. As such, it is not a definition. The author then commits the error of touting this truncated “definition” of Guénonianism as representative of “Traditionalism” as a whole.

Including all who have contemplated Guénon as Traditionalists, the author devotes an entire chapter (12) to the Neo-Eurasian political movement headed by Alexander Dugin, while there is no analysis of central Traditional figures such as Titus Burchhardt and Martin Lings. To justify this approach, he invents the label “soft Traditionalist”, meaning “someone for whom Traditionalism was evidently important but not a determining influence, and for whom it had few visible consequences”. (38) If Alexander Dugin is indeed a “soft-Traditionalist”, as the author states, (230) for whom Traditional writings were not a “determining influence” or “had no visible consequences”, how is it that Dugin is also cited as “a centrally important Traditionalist”? (221) Movements such as Dugin’s that combine a misunderstanding of Tradition with a political ideology were foreseen and disavowed by Guénon himself as a way of “denaturing the idea of tradition”.[9]

A similar lack of discernment pervades the author’s treatment of other movements and figures treated in this book. Foremost among them is the renowned Professor of Religious Studies, Mircea Eliade, also labeled a “soft-Traditionalist”. In comparing Eliade and Guénon, the author writes:

What Eliade called “archaic” religions and Guénon called “tradition” had generally been termed “primitive” religion, a term that carried the evolutionary implication that these religions were somehow incomplete precursors of a more perfect later religion. (191)

Guénon, however, applied the term tradition to all religions, including Islam, which was for him the last revealed religion and which he cites as an example of an integrated traditional civilization still founded upon principles.[10] Islam hardly qualifies as “archaic” in the sense that Eliade employed the term. While Mircea Eliade may have been searching for the ultimate ur religion, Guénon never engaged in such speculation, always looking to the transcendent, not earthly, origin of religion.

It is well known that Eliade had extensive contact with prominent members of the Traditional school and took their writings very seriously. Although these authors may have had a central influence in shaping his initial appreciation of non-Western religions, Eliade maintained that, “the sacred is a structure of human consciousness”.[11] This understanding is clearly distinct from Guénon’s position that the sacred is “of a super-human order”. As expressed by S. H. Nasr: “That Reality which is immutable and eternal is the Sacred as such, and the manifestation of this Reality in the stream of becoming and the matrix of time is that which possesses the quality of sacredness.”[12] For Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Schuon and those who followed them, the Sacred can never be conceived of as an individual human construct or a social construct. It is in fact the very reduction of the sacred to quantitative “human” norms that Guénon decries in The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times; for it relegates objective reality to the discursive constructions of the human subject.

The author goes on to claim that Eliade found support for his Traditionalist positions in the writings of Rudolf Otto and this “helped relieve him of the need to cite Guénon”. (191) Many scholars have observed that Otto’s ideas influenced Eliade. But the relation of the sacred to the irrational that pervades Otto’s thought is far from Guénon’s emphasis on “pure principles”. One could hardly cite Rudolf Otto in place of Réné Guénon or in support of Traditional ideas.

The greatly expanded category of Traditionalists employed in Against the Modern World leads to loose associations that sometimes draw it into the realm of the absurd. For example, the author includes the Feminist group Aristasia, which views the rise of masculine gods as the first phase in the decline of humanity because the female is the primary and inherently superior gender. (217) This group is labeled a Traditionalist movement because its proponents make some reference to Guénon and oppose many aspects of the modern world. In an odd way this label may be correct. Aristasia is a perfect example of the “traditionalists” regarding whom Guénon writes, “Indeed it sometimes happens that people go so far as to apply the word “tradition” to things which are by their very nature as anti-traditional as possible . . .”[13]

Scholarly Method

Unable to grasp that Traditional perspective is grounded in first principles, the author often relegates himself to writing about rumor and conjecture from “anonymous sources” rather than analyzing the writings of those he proposes to examine. He does not cite basic sources such as Jacob Needleman’s The Sword of Gnosis, Frithjof Schuon’s Esoterism as Principle and as Way or Logic and Transcendence, S. H. Nasr’s Knowledge and the Sacred, Titus Burckhardt’s Mirror of the Intellect, Ranjit Fernando’s The Unanimous Tradition, or The Essential Writings of A. K. Coomaraswamy, to name only a few. In fact, more of the essential Traditional works are omitted than are included. One wonders how a book with such egregious omissions could have passed the peer-review process.

The methodological shortcomings that lead the author to seek refuge in unreliable sources are evident from the beginning when he writes, “some sections of this book depend more on guesswork than is usual,” (viii) and, “I have entered into numerous areas where I have little scholarly right to be.” (viii) Unfortunately, guesswork is employed where readily available resources, in written and human form, could have provided important clarifications. For example, there is no interview with Martin Lings who served as Guénon’s personal secretary for many years and was a close disciple of Frithjof Schuon, nor are Lings’ two articles on Guénon and Schuon cited.[14] There is one interview with S. H. Nasr (10), but it does not appear to have involved any essential questions about his own involvement with the movement or his relationship with other Traditional scholars. The several pages devoted to Nasr’s work in Iran (153-159) raise important questions that Nasr himself could have easily clarified. The lack of interviews would not be of such concern if the author did not rely so heavily upon extensive interviews with people opposed to certain representatives of the Traditional school. The opinions of such interviewees, many of whom remain anonymous, are not then balanced with other interviews or with readily available essays published in Dossier H: Frithjof Schuon[15] and the Traditional journals Sacred Web and Sophia, the latter of which has one volume dedicated entirely to Frithjof Schuon.[16]

Islam

The author’s foray into areas where he has “little scholarly right” is evident in his treatment of Islam, wherein he conflates Islam and Islamism. He claims, “nearly all non-Traditionalist Muslims would assert unhesitatingly that there was no proper access to God, and no final truth, except in Islam.” (140) Such a statement is compatible with Islamism, which it is noted “has no interest in Perennialism and commonly rejects Sufism.” (341, note 94) But it does not categorize Islam. Muslims from many countries and many walks of life do in fact accept the validity of other religions. The law of many Islamic lands has even required the protection of Jews and Christians. In India this was often extended to Hindus. The underlying religious tolerance of Islam is well expressed by Khalid Abou El Fadl:

Other than a general endorsement of human diversity, the Qur’an also accepted the more specific notion of a plurality of religious beliefs and laws. Although the Qur’an clearly claims that Islam is the divine truth, and demands belief in Muhammad as the final Messenger in a long line of Abrahamic prophets, it does not completely exclude the possibility that there might be other paths to salvation. The Qur’an insists on God’s unfettered discretion to accept in His mercy whomever He wishes. In a rather remarkable set of passages that, again, have not been adequately theorized by Muslim theologians, the Qur’an recognizes the legitimate multiplicity of religious convictions and laws. In one such passage, for example, the Qur’an asserts: “To each of you God has prescribed a Law and a Way. If God would have willed, He would have made you a single people. But God’s purpose is to test you in what he has given each of you, so strive in the pursuit of virtue, and know that you will all return to God [in the Hereafter], and He will resolve all the matters in which you disagree.”[17] On this and other occasions the Qur’an goes on to state that it is possible for non-Muslims to attain the blessing of salvation: “Those who believe, those who follow Jewish scriptures, the Christians, the Sabians, and any who believe in God and the Final Day, and do good, all shall have their reward with their Lord and they will not come to fear or grief.”[18]

This may not be full-fledged perennialism, but it is far from the categorical rejection of other religions that the author implies is central to Islam.

Although the author has previously published a book on Sufism (Sufism, the Essentials, 2000), he does not grasp the central importance of dhikr, remembrance. He criticizes Frithjof Schuon’s interpretation of 29:45, Recite what is inspired to you of the Book and establish ritual prayer, for ritual prayer preserves you from wrong and iniquity, and the remembrance of God (dhikrullah) is greater. Regarding this verse, Schuon writes (in a passage that evaded the author):

The formula “the remembrance of God is greater” or “the greatest thing” (Wa la-dhikru ‘Llahi akbar) evokes and paraphrases the following words from the Canonical Prayer: “God is greater” or “the greatest” (Allahu akbar) and this indicates a mysterious connection between God and His Name; it also indicates a certain relativity  from the point of view of gnosis  of the outward rites, which are nevertheless indispensable in principle and in the majority of cases. In this connection we could also quote the following hadith: one of the Companions said to the Prophet: “0 Messenger of God, the prescriptions of Islam are too numerous for me; tell me something that I can hold fast to.” The Prophet replied: “Let thy tongue always be supple (in movement) with the mention (the remembrance) of God.” This hadith, like the verse we have just quoted, expresses by allusion (isharah) the principle of the inherence of the whole Shari’ah in the Dhikralone.[19]

This in no way denies the necessity of the Shariah, rather, it emphasizes the necessity and centrality of dhikr. Nonetheless, the author sees this interpretation accepted by Schuon and his disciples as “an indication of their distance from the Islamic mainstream.” (note 115, p. 294) But it is actually a rephrasing of an essential Sufi teaching. As Shaykh al-‘Arabi al-Darqawi expresses it:

…every single man has any number of needs, but in reality all men need only one thing, which is truly to practice the remembrance of God (dhikrullah); if they have acquired that, they will not want for anything . . .[20]

Similar teachings can be found in hundreds of books from classical Sufi scholars such as Abu Nasr al-Sarraj, Abu al-Qasim al-Qushayri, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Jalal al-Din Rumi, Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-‘Arabi and Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri to name a very few. So although Schuon’s emphasis may distance him from mainstream Islamism, it is at the very heart of Islam itself.

Misrepresentations of Traditionalist Scholars

Though the author distorts the ideas of Réné Guénon, Guénon is the only Traditional writer for whom he maintains respect. He sees fit to cast aspersions upon other eminent Traditional scholars with little analysis. For example, he acknowledges that A. K. Coomaraswamy had “a considerable reputation as a scholar”, (34) but then dismisses him as un-academic, relying upon the opinion of one former assistant to Coomaraswamy and a single review from TheHarvard Journal of Asiatic Studies. (34-36) It would seem that a scholar of Coomaraswamy’s stature deserves greater analysis before being dismissed out of hand. That the author has no real familiarity with Coomaraswamy’s work is demonstrated not only by the citation of merely one book, but also by the claim that “he had not trained as a philologist or a historian of religion.” (36) Coomaraswamy’s works display unparalleled linguistic capabilities, citing over a dozen languages, from Sanskrit to Latin to Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew. Few scholars have been better qualified for the comparative analysis of ancient texts that is at the very heart of philology.

The author also implies that Joseph Epes Brown’s The Scared Pipe: Black Elks’ Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux is not an authentic academic work, but largely a Traditionalist fabrication:

The Sacred Pipe was written largely in Lausanne over a period of six months, with the benefit of Schuon’s Traditionalist understandings made available during a weekly review by Schuon of Brown’s draft as it developed. The Sacred Pipe, then, resulted in the generally unsuspected passage of “soft” Traditionalism into mainstream academia. (123)

It may be that Brown consulted Schuon, but The Sacred Pipe is considered by experts to be a faithful rendition of Brown’s interviews with Black Elk from 1947 to 1948. It seems that the author casts aspersions on this book simply because Brown consulted with Schuon. Such criticism is staggeringly incogitant in light of the wide acceptance this book has received, not only among established scholars but among Native American spiritual authorities as well.

Frithjof Schuon

The perfunctory dismissal of Coomaraswamy and the aspersions cast upon Brown’s academic integrity are inappropriate by any standard, especially for one with no expertise in either of their respective fields. But the author goes to greater extremes in his treatment of Frithjof Schuon. Accusations and aspersions drawn from anonymous sources, conjecture and innuendo pervade the book from the introduction to the conclusion.

The degree to which the author incorporates his own speculations is well illustrated by the following passage: “According to one possible interpretation, Schuon at this stage [1970s] may have been wondering whether he was perhaps the prophet Elijah returned at the end of time, or alternatively, a manifestation of the Hindu goddess Kali.” (170) To substantiate this assertion he relies upon an oblique reference in Schuon’s autobiography, Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen, to a conference in Houston, Texas at which a paper on Elijah was presented by Leo Schaya. The author claims that the article draws “attention to the relationship between the activities of the Maryamiyya and the eschatological function of Elijah”. (316, note 52) Schaya’s “The Mission of Elias” is in fact a comparison of Elijah and Khidr and the eschatological expectations of the three Abrahamic faiths. There is a brief reference to the writings of Schuon, but it does not compare Schuon to Elijah or imply that he is the Prophet Elijah returned. Although Schuon had never even referred to the article itself, only to the conference, we are nonetheless informed, “here Schuon is at least quoting with approval an implicit comparison between him and Elijah.” (316, note 52) This is a dire distortion of both Schuon and Schaya.

Building upon such distortions, the author portrays Schuon as a tragic figure whose form of universalism “lumps religions together indistinctly”. (129) His ultimate conclusion is that “Schuon also developed Perennialism into a universal mission of his own that led ultimately to disaster.” (267) To corroborate this claim he relies upon interviews with former followers of Schuon. (170-177) But he never provides a single citation from any of Schuon’s books other than the autobiography. Further investigation would have revealed that Schuon clarifies this important point in almost all of his writings, such as Gnosis: Divine Wisdom:

Seeing that there is but one Truth, must we not conclude that there is but one Revelation, one sole Tradition possible? To this our answer is, first of all, that Truth and Revelation are not absolutely equivalent terms, since Truth is situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation, or the Tradition which derives from it, belongs to the formal order, and that indeed by definition; but to speak of form is to speak of diversity, and so of plurality; the grounds for the existence and nature of form are expression, limitation, differentiation. What enters into form thereby enters also into number, hence into repetition and diversity; the formal principle  inspired by the infinity of the divine Possibility  confers diversity on this repetition. One could conceive, it is true, that there might be only one Revelation or Tradition for this our human world and that diversity should be realized through other worlds, unknown to man or even unknowable by him; but that would imply a failure to understand that what determines the difference among forms of Truth is the difference among human receptacles. (emphasis added)[21]

In other words, religious forms cannot be joined together in the realm of manifestation, i.e. in this world; their only unity lies in the transcendent formless Truth from which they emanate. It seems unlikely that a man who maintained this in all of his writings, from the first to the last, the private to the public, would have “confused the accurate, Perennialist observation of the transcendent unity of religions with a foolish and impossible attempt to recreate a single unified religion on earth.” (Sedgwick, 177) Further investigation into the subtleties of Schuon’s thought would have helped prevent this dire misrepresentation.

Rather than analyzing Schuon’s ideas, the author goes into many details of Schuon’s life, from a failed love to scurrilous and derisive accusations that were dismissed from a court of law in 1991. But in all instances he disregards essential material. For example, he portrays tense relations between Schuon and the followers of Schuon’s Shaykh, Ahmad al-Alawi, after Shaykh al-Alawi’s death, implying that Schuon did not have the right to become a SufiShaykh by the name of ‘IsaNur al-Din. (88-90) But he neglects to mention that Schuon and his followers in Lausanne maintained good relations with Shaykh al-Alawi’s successor, Shaykh ‘Ada Ben Tounes, and his followers. As Titus Burckhardt wrote of one meeting with Shaykh al-Mahdi Ben Tounes, the son of Shaykh ‘Ada Ben Tounes:

At the last majlis (prayer gathering) Shaykh Al-Mahdi asked Shaykh ‘Isa to give a mudhakkarah (sermon); but, out of modesty, the latter refused. I then proposed to Shaykh Al-Mahdi that I read one of Shaykh ‘Isa’s latest mudhakkarah, and Shaykh ‘Isa allowed me to do so. When I had finished, there was at first silence; then Shaykh Al-Mahdi rose, took off his burnous and put it on Shaykh ‘Isa’s shoulders, whereupon he spoke of the companions of the Prophet, of those who lived in his time and those who lived later and concluded that the last of them was Shaykh ‘Isa. (letter to Paul Gervy, 1954)[22]

One could read many things into this encounter. The least it says is that Shaykh al-Mahdi Ben Tounes recognized Frithjof Schuon as a SufiShaykh. The author’s footnotes demonstrate that he was in contact with Jean-Baptiste Aymard, who co-authored the book in which this letter is reprinted, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings. This is thus information to which the author most likely could have gained access.

To further impugn Schuon’s credentials, the author misrepresents the method of invocation Schuon prescribed for the adherents of his Sufi order, the Maryamiyyah. He briefly mentions Schuon’s Six Themes of Meditation, “Death and Life,” “Repose and Action”, and “Knowledge and Being” (92) and later implies that they were in some way non-Islamic. (128) But again he provides no analysis and neglects to inform the reader that these were six modes for invoking the Arabic Name of God, Allah. If he had the access he claims to many former members of the Maryamiyyah Order, he should have been able to obtain the texts wherein Schuon often employs Islamic terminology to explain these themes. Furthermore, the themes are fully discussed in the last chapter of Stations of Wisdom. Here Schuon refers to them as “renunciation and act, peace and fervor, discernment and union”,[23] topics that are discussed as various spiritual states or stations in many classical Sufi texts.

Continuing this line of argument, the author cites the Romanian Traditionalist Michele Vâlsan as one of Schuon’s leading detractors. (129) Vâlsan had been a follower of Schuon who objected to Schuon’s more esoteric interpretation of Islam and separated with a few other disciples around 1950, forming a new Sufi order. The author portrays Vâlsan as “closer to mainstream Sufi Islam” (133) and cites Vâlsan’s objections to Schuon with approval. Then he notes that, “by his death in 1974 he [Valsân] had perhaps 100 followers, a respectable number, only rarely exceeded by shaykhs in the Islamic world.”[24] (134) (This number is often exceeded by Shaykhs in many parts of the Islamic world, but that is another issue.) Here again, the author fails to tell the full story. As Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude have written:

What many of Schuon’s detractors do not know is that several years later, in 1958, Michel Vâlsan went to Lausanne and, in a gesture of superb humility, apologized for everything that had happened, and suggested reintegrating his group with Schuon’s. Though touched by the offer, Schuon declined, for, as he wrote, he “did not want to reap what (Sidi Mustafa) had sown” and did not wish to have under his authority men who were integrally Guénonian and somewhat hesitant with regard to his own perspective.” (letter to Leo Schaya, September 3, 1958)[25]

Such negligent and erroneous treatment of Coomaraswamy, Brown and Schuon illustrate the degree to which the author excludes vital information from his presentation. His analysis of the teachings of most Traditional scholars is practically non-existent and his account of their personal histories is fragmented at best.

The excessive focus upon the personal lives of Traditional scholars leads the author to believe that their undisclosed personal and intellectual associations pose serious questions about the authenticity of their perspective. As if the failure to mention what Church or Synagogue a Christian or Jewish scholar attends constitutes a grave deception. He thus writes of their works:

Not everyone is happy when they discover Traditionalism behind these books. One Scandinavian scientist who had converted to Islam reacted with dismay on reading an article of mine which identified Traditionalist writers that she, and others she knew, had read unawares: “‘Traditionalist’ books are everywhere,…” she wrote. “Perhaps most scary is the subtle penetration of ‘traditionalist’ thinking without references.…People pick up these ideas because they are appealing and then pass them on…” (169)

Indeed, the Traditional perspective has been far more influential in academia than most have suspected. This, however, may be due to the fact that many of their ideas do find correspondences within the world’s religions. Something recognized by such eminent scholars as Mircea Eliade and Huston Smith. What Sedgwick refers to as “subtle penetration” is in fact not so subtle, and certainly not sinister, no matter how many Muslim Scandinavian scientists are scandalized by it. That a new perspective that challenges many academic norms is spreading within academia gives one hope that, despite the peculiar prejudices of academia, new perspectives are able to slowly work their way into the cannon, challenging students of all disciplines to consider the world in new ways.

Conclusion

Though the writing style can be engaging at times, this study lacks any real substance. The author fails to analyze the content of most Traditional writings, and misrepresents the content of many others. One is never sure that he himself understands what Tradition means for those who profess it. Unable to comprehend the core elements of his study, he never comes to appreciate its full importance. This is best demonstrated when he writes,

…every non-Traditionalist scholar who has looked at Traditionalism…has come to much the same conclusion: these people are not serious. They ignore history, and they ignore anything that does not fit their theories. (271)

100 pages earlier he writes, “Schuonian authors are usually acknowledged experts in some field.” (168) It is indeed very rare for scholars who are not taken seriously to become “acknowledged experts”.

The author’s blatant self-contradictions aside, the international recognition received by many Traditional scholars belies his claim. For example, the author includes Huston Smith among the “soft-Traditionalists” (165-66) and cites his 1989 Plenary Address to the American Academy of Religion as an example of his subtle “Traditionalism”. Indeed, Huston Smith has openly praised leading Traditional authors, writing of Schuon, “In depth and breadth, a paragon of our time. I know of no living thinker who begins to rival him.”[26] Regarding Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Knowledge and the Sacred, he writes: “… intellectual historians may one day rank it with William of Moerbeke’s Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Marsiglio Ficino’s of Plato in the fifteenth, or D. T. Suzuki’s 1927 Essays in Zen Buddhism as a landmark showing that a new stage in cross-cultural understanding has been achieved.”[27] Now, either Smith is not a representative of the Traditional school, as some maintain, or he is. In the first case, one of the most renowned scholars of religion recognizes the importance of the Traditional movement and takes it very seriously. In the second, the American Academy of Religion and thousands of professors who have assigned his Religions of Man in college classrooms recognize the importance of this particular Traditional thinker. Either way, it is an excellent example of the Traditional perspective being taken very seriously in the highest ranks of academia. Other examples include Joseph Epes Brown, who is recognized as one of the 20th century’s leading scholars of Native American Religion, and Martin Lings, whose Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources is used in universities the world over and whose A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century is still one of the best academic studies of the life and teachings of a SufiShaykh.

The recognition received by S. H. Nasr alone is enough to prove the absurdity of the claim that the Traditional school is not taken seriously. Nasr was the first Muslim to be included in The Library of Living Philosophers, a series that includes such luminaries as Albert Einstein, John Dewey, Bertrand Russel, Martin Buber, Karl Popper and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Scholars from around the world representing many academic disciplines read Nasr’s writings and provided in-depth responses for this volume. Nasr has delivered perhaps the two most esteemed lecture series in academia, Gifford (1981) and Cadbury (1994). His books have been published by Harvard University Press and Oxford University Press, among others. He served as the General Editor for the SUNY Press series on Islam, is a member of the Council of 100 Leaders on Western-Islamic Dialogue and is invited to lecture at the United Nations and at major universities the world over. It is difficult to find a living scholar who has received greater recognition and is taken more seriously.

The overabundance of errors, misrepresentations and disinformation in Against the Modern World would take an entire book to clarify and refute. This essay has only been able to focus upon the most obvious and systemic shortcomings. In his prologue, Mark Sedgwick states, “As a historian, I am convinced that a carefully told story is in itself a path to understanding, and that conviction underlies the book that follows this prologue.” (17) His ultimate failure is that he does not take the Traditional school seriously, does not want it to be taken seriously and therefore does not take the time to analyze its teachings or tell its story carefully. He has ignored most of the primary literature, much of the secondary literature and anything that would complicate his personal theories.[28] In doing so, he has squandered a golden opportunity to provide a detailed analysis of a perspective that is gaining increasing acceptance in many academic circles. One hopes that future investigations into the Traditional school will serve to clear the waters that this unfortunate book has now muddied.

[11] Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. i; idem, A History of Religious Ideas, Vol I, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. W. Trask (University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. iii.

[24] Here one is left to wonder how it is that Vâlsan having around 100 disciples at the time of his death is a sign of success, but Schuon having several hundred disciples on five continents is not. Instead, the author labels Schuon’s Maryamiyyah Order “a disaster”. (268)

[28] That the Traditional perspective would be subject to such attacks was predicted by Guénon when he wrote: “It is always easy for a man to belittle what he has no knowledge of, and, when he is incapable of reaching it, assumed contempt is actually his best means of consoling himself for his impotence, and it is, moreover, a means that is at everyone’s disposal.” East and West, p. 174.

Om the most sacred syllable in Hinduism, containing all origination and dissolution; regarded as the "seed" of all mantras, its three mātrās or letters are taken to be symbolical of the Trimūrti, while the silence at its conclusion is seen as expressing the attainment of Brahma.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

mathThe dwelling of an ascetic. The term refers in general to any ascetic or monastic community, but particularly to any of the monastic institutions established by Ādi Śankara; for example, the Kānci Matha.

Pater nosterIn Latin, “Our Father”. In Christianity, it refers to the Lord’s Prayer, consisting of the words: “Our Father who art inHeaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen” (Matt. 6:9-13).

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

HonenFounder of the independent school of Pure Land (Jodo) Bud­dhism in Japan. He maintained that the traditional monastic practices were not ef­fective in the Last Age (mappo) nor universal for all people, as intended by Amida’s Vow. He incurred opposition from the establishment Buddhism and went into exile with several disciples, including Shinran. His major treatise, which was a manifesto of his teaching, was Senchaku hongan nembutsu shu (Treatise on the Nembutsu of the Select Primal Vow, abbreviated to Senchakushu).

Original VowA term referring to the Vows of Amida, which indicate that he worked for aeons and aeons in the past. "Original" is also translated as "Primal," or "Primordial" to suggest an event in the timeless past of eternity.

Amida BuddhaThe Buddha of Eternal Life and Infinite Light; according to the Pure Land teaching the Buddha who has established the way to Enlightenment for ordinary people; based on his forty-eight Vows and the recitation of his name Namu-Amida-Butsu one expresses devotion and gratitude.

birth in the Pure Land"Symbolic expression for the transcendence of delusion. While such a birth was thought to come after death in traditional Pure Land thought, Shinran spoke of its realization here and now; for example he states, ‘although my defiled body remains in samsara, my mind and heart play in the Pure Land.’" ( Taitetsu Unno, taken from his Key Terms of Shin Buddhism, in the essay (contained in this volume) entitled, "The Practice of Jodo-shinshu.")

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

GenshinGenshin (942-1017) was a major figure in the Japanese development of Pure Land teaching, author of the Essentials of Rebirth [in the Pure Land] (Ōjōyōshū), a manual which popularized the teaching and illustrated the path to salvation. His writing was instrumental in Hōnen’s discovery of Shan-tao’s teaching of nembutsu. In Shinran’s lineage he was the sixth great teacher.

HonenFounder of the independent school of Pure Land (Jodo) Bud­dhism in Japan. He maintained that the traditional monastic practices were not ef­fective in the Last Age (mappo) nor universal for all people, as intended by Amida’s Vow. He incurred opposition from the establishment Buddhism and went into exile with several disciples, including Shinran. His major treatise, which was a manifesto of his teaching, was Senchaku hongan nembutsu shu (Treatise on the Nembutsu of the Select Primal Vow, abbreviated to Senchakushu).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

jiriki(A)Self power; the consciousness that one achieves Enlightenment through one’s own effort. In Pure Land Buddhism it is considered a delusory understanding of the true nature of practice and faith, which are supported and enabled through Amida’s compassion. (B) One who is "liberated" while still in this "life"; a person who has attained to a state of spiritual perfection or self-realization before death; in contrast to videha-muktav, one who is liberated at the moment of death..

MahayanaThe Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

moksaliberation or release from the round of birth and death (samsāra); deliverance from ignorance (avidyā). According to Hindu teaching, moksha is the most important aim of life, and it is attained by following one of the principal mārgas or spiritual paths (see bhakti, jnāna, and karma).

nembutsu(A) "The practice of reciting Namu-Amida-Butsu (the Name of Amida) is known as recitative nembutsu. There is also meditative nembutsu, which is a method of contemplation. Nembutsu is used synonymously with myogo, or the Name." (Unno) (B) "remembrance or mindfulness of the Buddha," based upon the repeated invocation of his Name; same as buddhānusmriti in Sanskrit and nien-fo in Chinese.

Original VowA term referring to the Vows of Amida, which indicate that he worked for aeons and aeons in the past. "Original" is also translated as "Primal," or "Primordial" to suggest an event in the timeless past of eternity.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Pure Land"Translation from the Chinese ching-t’u (jodo in Japanese). The term as such is not found in Sanskrit, the closest being the phrase ‘purification of the Buddha Land.’ Shinran describes it as the ‘Land of Immeasurable Light,’ referring not to a place that emanates light, but a realization whenever one is illumined by the light of compassion." (Unno)

Shan-taoShan-tao (613-681) was an important scholar of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism whose teaching greatly affected Hōnen and Shinran through his commentary on the Sutra of Contemplation and systematization of Pure Land doctrine. He is credited with stressing the recitation of the nembutsu as the central act of Amida’s Vow and Pure Land devotion.

Shan-taoAn important scholar of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism whose teaching greatly affected Honen and Shinran through his commentary on the Sutra of Contemplation and systematization of Pure Land doctrine. He is credited with stressing the recitation of the nembutsu as the central act of Amida’s Vow and Pure Land devotion.

sutraLiterally, "thread;" a Hindu or Buddhist sacred text; in Hinduism, any short, aphoristic verse or collection of verses, often elliptical in style; in Buddhism, a collection of the discourses of the Buddha.

tariki(A) literally, "power of the other"; a Buddhist term for forms of spirituality that emphasize the importance of grace or celestial assistance, especially that of the Buddha Amida, as in the Pure Land schools; in contrast to jiriki. (B) Other Power; "The working of the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha, which nullifies all dualistic notions, including constructs of self and other. According to Shinran, ‘Other Power means to be free of any form of calculations (hakarai).’" (Unno)

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VasubandhuIn Shin Buddhism, the second great teacher in Shinran’s lineage. A major Mahayana teacher who laid the foundation of the Consciousness-Only school. In Pure Land tradition his commentary to the Larger Pure Land Sutra is a central text. To Zen Buddhism, he is the 21st Patriarch. Vasubandhu lived in fourth or fifth century (C.E.) India.

yamabushiJapanese Buddhist ascetics who lived in the mountains. They cultivated spiritual power for healings and exorcisms, and worked among the village people. In current usage, the term generally refers to those who follow Shugendō, an ascetic religion that incorporates elements of Shinto, Buddhism, and animism.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

TalmudLiterally, “learning, study.” In Judaism, the Talmud is a body of writings and traditional commentaries based on the oral law given to Moses on Sinai. It is the foundation of Jewish civil and religious law, second in authority only to the Torah.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

darshanLiterally, “seeing” or “perceiving.” In Hinduism darshan refers to the perception of the ultimate Truth perhaps through one’s own experience or perhaps through such secondary means as seeing (thus experiencing the spiritual essence of) a guru, a saint , a holy site, or a sacred effigy. For example, Hindus speak of "having a darshan" when they are in the presence of a holy person and experience a state of interiorizing contemplation brought about by the presence of that person. Another meaning involves the various “points of view” or philosophical systems represented by the six main orthodox or classical schools of Hindu philosophy: (1) Nyāya (logic); (2) Vaisheshika (natural philosophy, or science); (3) Sānkhya (cosmology); (4) Yoga (science of union); (5) Pûrva-Mîmāmsā (meditation); and (6) Uttara-Mîmāmsā (Vedānta, or metaphysics); also the blessing derived from beholding a saint.

darshanLiterally, “seeing” or “perceiving.” In Hinduism darshan refers to the perception of the ultimate Truth perhaps through one’s own experience or perhaps through such secondary means as seeing (thus experiencing the spiritual essence of) a guru, a saint , a holy site, or a sacred effigy. For example, Hindus speak of "having a darshan" when they are in the presence of a holy person and experience a state of interiorizing contemplation brought about by the presence of that person. Another meaning involves the various “points of view” or philosophical systems represented by the six main orthodox or classical schools of Hindu philosophy: (1) Nyāya (logic); (2) Vaisheshika (natural philosophy, or science); (3) Sānkhya (cosmology); (4) Yoga (science of union); (5) Pûrva-Mîmāmsā (meditation); and (6) Uttara-Mîmāmsā (Vedānta, or metaphysics); also the blessing derived from beholding a saint.

darshanLiterally, “seeing” or “perceiving.” In Hinduism darshan refers to the perception of the ultimate Truth perhaps through one’s own experience or perhaps through such secondary means as seeing (thus experiencing the spiritual essence of) a guru, a saint , a holy site, or a sacred effigy. For example, Hindus speak of "having a darshan" when they are in the presence of a holy person and experience a state of interiorizing contemplation brought about by the presence of that person. Another meaning involves the various “points of view” or philosophical systems represented by the six main orthodox or classical schools of Hindu philosophy: (1) Nyāya (logic); (2) Vaisheshika (natural philosophy, or science); (3) Sānkhya (cosmology); (4) Yoga (science of union); (5) Pûrva-Mîmāmsā (meditation); and (6) Uttara-Mîmāmsā (Vedānta, or metaphysics); also the blessing derived from beholding a saint.

darshanLiterally, “seeing” or “perceiving.” In Hinduism darshan refers to the perception of the ultimate Truth perhaps through one’s own experience or perhaps through such secondary means as seeing (thus experiencing the spiritual essence of) a guru, a saint , a holy site, or a sacred effigy. For example, Hindus speak of "having a darshan" when they are in the presence of a holy person and experience a state of interiorizing contemplation brought about by the presence of that person. Another meaning involves the various “points of view” or philosophical systems represented by the six main orthodox or classical schools of Hindu philosophy: (1) Nyāya (logic); (2) Vaisheshika (natural philosophy, or science); (3) Sānkhya (cosmology); (4) Yoga (science of union); (5) Pûrva-Mîmāmsā (meditation); and (6) Uttara-Mîmāmsā (Vedānta, or metaphysics); also the blessing derived from beholding a saint.

humanismThe intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Mutatis mutandismore or less literally, "with necessary changes being made" or "with necessary changes being taken into consideration". This adverbial phrase is used in philosophy and logic to point out that although two conditions or statements may seem to be very analagous or similar, the reader should not lose sight of the differences between the two. Perhaps an even more easily understood translation might be "with obvious differences taken into consideration…"

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

humanismThe intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

nousintelligence, immediate awareness, intuition, intuitive intellect; Plato distinguished nous from dianoia – discursive reason; Nous is the second hupostasis of Plotinus; every intelligence is its own object, therefore the act of intellection always involves self-consciousness: the substance of intelligence is its noetic content ( noeton), its power of intellection ( nous), and its activity – the act of noesis; in a macrocosmic sense, Nous is the divine Intellct, the Second God, who embraces and personifies the entire noetic cosmos (Being-Life-Intelligence), the Demiurge of the manifested universe; such Nous may be compared to Hindu Ishvara and be represented by such solar gods as the Egyptian Ra; nous is independent of body and thus immune from destruction – it is the unitary and divine element, or the spark of divine light, which is present in men and through which the ascent to the divine Sun is made possible.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

theurgytheurgy; the rites understood as divine acts ( theia erga) or the working of the gods ( theon erga); theurgy is not intellectual theorizing about God (theologia), but elevation to God; the term is coined by he editors of the Chaldean Oracles, but the ancient practice of contacting the gods and ascent to the divine goes back to the Mesopotamian and Egyptian hieratic traditions; the Neoplatonic theurgy is based both on the Chaldean patterns and the exegesis of Plato’s Phaedrus, Timaeus, Symposium, and other dialogues, and thus regarded as an outgrowth of the Platonic philosophy and the Pythagorean negative theology; therefore the theurgical praxis do not contradict the dialectic of Plato; theurgy deifies the soul through the series of ontological symbols and sunthemata that cover the entire hierarchy of being and lead to the unification and ineffable unity with the gods; theurgy is based on the laws of cosmogony in their ritual expression and imitates the orders of the gods; for Iamblichus, it transcends all rational philosophy (or intellectual understanding) and transforms man into a divine being

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

apatheiaimpassivity or freedom from emotions, understood as a philosophical virtue; apatheia means not being affected in any way and is applied both to the sages and transcendent entities by the Neoplatonists.

daimonin the ancient Greek religion, daimon designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a peculiar mode of activity: it is an occult power that drives man forward or acts against him: since daimon is the veiled countenance of divine activity, every god can act as daimon; a special knowledge of daimones is claimed by Pythagoreans; for Plato, daimon, is a spiritual being who watches over each individual, and is tantamount to his higher self, or an angel; whereas Plato is called ‘divine’ by Neoplatonists, Aristotle is regarded as daimonios, meaning ‘an intermediary to god" – therefore Arisotle stands to Plato as an angel to a god; for Proclus, daimones are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.

eroslove, sometimes personified as a deity, daimon, or cosmogonical, pedagogical and soteriological force, manifested in the process of demiurgy and within domain of providence; for Plato, philosophy is a sort of erotic madness ( mania), because Eros, though implying need, can inspire us with the love of wisdom; Diotima in Plato’s Symposium describes education in erotics as an upward journey or ascent towards the perfect noetic Beauty; Plotinus uses the union of lowers as a symbol of the soul’s union with the One ( Enn.VI.7.34.14-16); Proclus distinguishes two forms of love: 1) ascending love which urges lower principles to aspire towards their superiors, 2) descending or providential love ( eros pronoetikos) which obligates the superiors to care for their procucts and transmit divine grace ( In Alcib.54-56); for Dionysius the Areopagite, who follows Proclus, the eros ekstatikos becomes the unifying factor of the cosmos.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

guruspiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

nousintelligence, immediate awareness, intuition, intuitive intellect; Plato distinguished nous from dianoia – discursive reason; Nous is the second hupostasis of Plotinus; every intelligence is its own object, therefore the act of intellection always involves self-consciousness: the substance of intelligence is its noetic content ( noeton), its power of intellection ( nous), and its activity – the act of noesis; in a macrocosmic sense, Nous is the divine Intellct, the Second God, who embraces and personifies the entire noetic cosmos (Being-Life-Intelligence), the Demiurge of the manifested universe; such Nous may be compared to Hindu Ishvara and be represented by such solar gods as the Egyptian Ra; nous is independent of body and thus immune from destruction – it is the unitary and divine element, or the spark of divine light, which is present in men and through which the ascent to the divine Sun is made possible.

paradeigmaexemplar, paradigm, archetype, pattern, model; according to Plato, a paradigm of his perfect state is laid up in Heaven ( Rep.592b); the noetic Paradigm is regarded as the model for the creation: the visible world is a living creature made after the likeness of an eternal original, i.e. the ideal Living Animal in the world of Forms; thus the world is an image of the eternal paradigms ( paradeigmata); therefore the Demiurge makes cosmos as an agalma (hieratic statue, cultic image, ornament) and sets up within it the agalmata of the individual gods.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

adam In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

daimonin the ancient Greek religion, daimon designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a peculiar mode of activity: it is an occult power that drives man forward or acts against him: since daimon is the veiled countenance of divine activity, every god can act as daimon; a special knowledge of daimones is claimed by Pythagoreans; for Plato, daimon, is a spiritual being who watches over each individual, and is tantamount to his higher self, or an angel; whereas Plato is called ‘divine’ by Neoplatonists, Aristotle is regarded as daimonios, meaning ‘an intermediary to god" – therefore Arisotle stands to Plato as an angel to a god; for Proclus, daimones are the intermediary beings located between the celestial objects and the terrestrial inhabitants.

eroslove, sometimes personified as a deity, daimon, or cosmogonical, pedagogical and soteriological force, manifested in the process of demiurgy and within domain of providence; for Plato, philosophy is a sort of erotic madness ( mania), because Eros, though implying need, can inspire us with the love of wisdom; Diotima in Plato’s Symposium describes education in erotics as an upward journey or ascent towards the perfect noetic Beauty; Plotinus uses the union of lowers as a symbol of the soul’s union with the One ( Enn.VI.7.34.14-16); Proclus distinguishes two forms of love: 1) ascending love which urges lower principles to aspire towards their superiors, 2) descending or providential love ( eros pronoetikos) which obligates the superiors to care for their procucts and transmit divine grace ( In Alcib.54-56); for Dionysius the Areopagite, who follows Proclus, the eros ekstatikos becomes the unifying factor of the cosmos.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

nousintelligence, immediate awareness, intuition, intuitive intellect; Plato distinguished nous from dianoia – discursive reason; Nous is the second hupostasis of Plotinus; every intelligence is its own object, therefore the act of intellection always involves self-consciousness: the substance of intelligence is its noetic content ( noeton), its power of intellection ( nous), and its activity – the act of noesis; in a macrocosmic sense, Nous is the divine Intellct, the Second God, who embraces and personifies the entire noetic cosmos (Being-Life-Intelligence), the Demiurge of the manifested universe; such Nous may be compared to Hindu Ishvara and be represented by such solar gods as the Egyptian Ra; nous is independent of body and thus immune from destruction – it is the unitary and divine element, or the spark of divine light, which is present in men and through which the ascent to the divine Sun is made possible.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

theologiadivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

theosgod; the term sometimes is used in a wide and loose sense; ‘everything if full of gods’ (panta plere theon), according to Thales; the cosmos may be regarded as a theophany – the manifestation of the One (likened to the supreme transcendent Sun) and the divine Nous that constitute the different levels of divine presence concealed by the screens or veils ( parapetasmata); in ancient Greece, speaking of theos or theoi, one posits an absolute point of reference for everything that has impact, validity, and permanence, while indistinct influences which affect man directly can be called daimon; for Plato and Plotinus, nous, the universal soul, the stars, and also the human soul are divine; thus there are invisible and visible gods, arranged in a hierarchy of henads which follows the arrangement of nine hypothesis of Plato’s Parmenides; theoi are the first principles, henads (as protos theoi), intellects and divine souls, but the supreme God is the ineffable One, or the Good; in some respects, theos is an equivalent of the Egyptian neter; neteru are the gods, the first principles, divine powers, manifestations – both transcendent and immanent.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

bathe ancient Egyptian term which means ‘manifestation’ of certain divine qualities, arranged in the descending and ascending hierarchy; in the eschatological and soteriological context, it may be understood as ‘soul’ moving up and down, as an individual in an out-of-body state which is attained through initiation or death, when the physical body ( khat, soma) is experienced as a corpse; ba is the vehicle of ascent, pictured as a human-headed bird which flies into the spheres of light and finally becomes aware of oneself as an akh; the concept of ba influenced the Pythagorean and Platonic concept of soul ( psuche) who tries to restore her wings through anamnesis, initiation into philosophy, and when ascends to the divine realm.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

sunna(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

Tasawwuf Designates the whole of the contemplative ways founded on the sacred forms of Islam. By transposition an Arab might speak of “Christian taṣawwuf” or “Jewish taṣawwuf” to indicate the esotericism of the respective traditions.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

guruspiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

mantra literally, "instrument of thought"; a word or phrase of divine origin, often including a Name of God, repeated by those initiated into its proper use as a means of salvation or liberation; see japa.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

yin-yang in Chinese tradition, two opposite but complementary forces or qualities, from whose interpenetration the universe and all its diverse forms emerge; yin corresponds to the feminine, the yielding, the moon, and liquidity; yang corresponds to the masculine, the resisting, the sun, and solidity.

Amida BuddhaThe Buddha of Eternal Life and Infinite Light; according to the Pure Land teaching the Buddha who has established the way to Enlightenment for ordinary people; based on his forty-eight Vows and the recitation of his name Namu-Amida-Butsu one expresses devotion and gratitude.

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

HonenFounder of the independent school of Pure Land (Jodo) Bud­dhism in Japan. He maintained that the traditional monastic practices were not ef­fective in the Last Age (mappo) nor universal for all people, as intended by Amida’s Vow. He incurred opposition from the establishment Buddhism and went into exile with several disciples, including Shinran. His major treatise, which was a manifesto of his teaching, was Senchaku hongan nembutsu shu (Treatise on the Nembutsu of the Select Primal Vow, abbreviated to Senchakushu).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Jodo(A) Japanese term for "Pure Land." Though all Buddhas have their Pure Lands, the Land of Amida Buddha became the most well-known and desired in China and Japan because of its comprehensive nature, its popular propagation, and its ease of entry through recitation of his Name. (B) "pure land"; the untainted, transcendent realm created by the Buddha Amida (Amitabha in Sanskrit), into which his devotees aspire to be born in their next life.

mappoA theory of the progressive degeneration of Buddhism after the passing of the Buddha. In the Pure Land tradition it was believed that Amida gave his teaching primarily for beings of the last age, who were spiritually decadent.

nembutsu(A) "The practice of reciting Namu-Amida-Butsu (the Name of Amida) is known as recitative nembutsu. There is also meditative nembutsu, which is a method of contemplation. Nembutsu is used synonymously with myogo, or the Name." (Unno) (B) "remembrance or mindfulness of the Buddha," based upon the repeated invocation of his Name; same as buddhānusmriti in Sanskrit and nien-fo in Chinese.

Original VowA term referring to the Vows of Amida, which indicate that he worked for aeons and aeons in the past. "Original" is also translated as "Primal," or "Primordial" to suggest an event in the timeless past of eternity.

Pure Land"Translation from the Chinese ching-t’u (jodo in Japanese). The term as such is not found in Sanskrit, the closest being the phrase ‘purification of the Buddha Land.’ Shinran describes it as the ‘Land of Immeasurable Light,’ referring not to a place that emanates light, but a realization whenever one is illumined by the light of compassion." (Unno)

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

Theravadaan early form of Indian Buddhism translated as "The Teachings (or "way") of the Elders." As a historical religious tradition, it was formed soon after the death of the Sakyamuni Buddha. (This form of Buddhism is still practiced in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia.)

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VasubandhuIn Shin Buddhism, the second great teacher in Shinran’s lineage. A major Mahayana teacher who laid the foundation of the Consciousness-Only school. In Pure Land tradition his commentary to the Larger Pure Land Sutra is a central text. To Zen Buddhism, he is the 21st Patriarch. Vasubandhu lived in fourth or fifth century (C.E.) India.

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

hypostases literally, "substances" (singular, hypostasis); in Eastern Christian theology, a technical term for the three "Persons" of the Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct hypostases sharing a single ousia, or essence.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

in divinisliterally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

mokshaliberation or release from the round of birth and death (samsāra); deliverance from ignorance (avidyā). According to Hindu teaching, moksha is the most important aim of life, and it is attained by following one of the principal mārgas or spiritual paths (see bhakti, jnāna, and karma).

sunnah(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

yin-yang in Chinese tradition, two opposite but complementary forces or qualities, from whose interpenetration the universe and all its diverse forms emerge; yin corresponds to the feminine, the yielding, the moon, and liquidity; yang corresponds to the masculine, the resisting, the sun, and solidity.

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

Nur Particularly the uncreated Divine Light, which includes all manifestation and is identified with Existence, considered as a principle. “God is the Light (Nūr) of the heavens and the earth…” (Qur’ān 24:35).

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

adam In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

MahayanaThe Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

nirvanaIn Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Pure Land"Translation from the Chinese ching-t’u (jodo in Japanese). The term as such is not found in Sanskrit, the closest being the phrase ‘purification of the Buddha Land.’ Shinran describes it as the ‘Land of Immeasurable Light,’ referring not to a place that emanates light, but a realization whenever one is illumined by the light of compassion." (Unno)

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Advaita "non-dualist" interpretation of the Vedānta; Hindu doctrine according to which the seeming multiplicity of things is regarded as the product of ignorance, the only true reality being Brahman, the One, the Absolute, the Infinite, which is the unchanging ground of appearance.

ascesis(A) "exercise, practice, training," as of an athlete; a regimen of self-denial, especially one involving fasting, prostrations, and other bodily disciplines. (B) in ancient philosophy, this term designates not an ‘asceticism’, but spiritual exercises, therefore philosophia is understood not as a theory of knowledge but as a lived wisdom, a way of living according to intellect ( nous); an askesis includes remembrance of God, the ‘watch of the heart’, or vigilance ( nepsis),prosoche, or attention to the beauty of the soul, the examination of our conscience and knowledge of ourselves.

ashramthe four stages of life for a Hindu: brahmacharya (life as a student), grihastha (life as a householder), vānaprastha (life as a forest-dweller), and sannyāsa (life as a renunciate); also a retreat, private home, or monastery where spiritual seekers reside.

Aum the most sacred syllable in Hinduism, containing all origination and dissolution; regarded as the "seed" of all mantras, its three mātrās or letters are taken to be symbolical of the Trimūrti, while the silence at its conclusion is seen as expressing the attainment of Brahma.

guruspiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

humanismThe intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

guruspiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

in divinisliterally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

psyche(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VedaThe sacred scriptures of Hinduism; regarded by the orthodox (āstika) as divine revelation (śruti) and comprising: (1) the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva Saṃhitās (collections of hymns); (2) the Brāhmanas (priestly treatises); (3) the Āranyakas (forest treatises); and (4) the Upaniṣāds (philosophical and mystical treatises); they are divided into a karma-kāṇḍa portion dealing with ritual action and a jñāna-kāṇḍa portion dealing with knowledge.

Amida BuddhaThe Buddha of Eternal Life and Infinite Light; according to the Pure Land teaching the Buddha who has established the way to Enlightenment for ordinary people; based on his forty-eight Vows and the recitation of his name Namu-Amida-Butsu one expresses devotion and gratitude.

birth in the Pure Land"Symbolic expression for the transcendence of delusion. While such a birth was thought to come after death in traditional Pure Land thought, Shinran spoke of its realization here and now; for example he states, ‘although my defiled body remains in samsara, my mind and heart play in the Pure Land.’" ( Taitetsu Unno, taken from his Key Terms of Shin Buddhism, in the essay (contained in this volume) entitled, "The Practice of Jodo-shinshu.")

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

DharmakaraSanskrit name for the Bodhisattva who through five aeons of practice perfected his Vows to establish an ideal land where all beings can easily attain Enlightenment. On completion of his Vows he became Amida Buddha and established the western Pure Land.

GenshinGenshin (942-1017) was a major figure in the Japanese development of Pure Land teaching, author of the Essentials of Rebirth [in the Pure Land] (Ōjōyōshū), a manual which popularized the teaching and illustrated the path to salvation. His writing was instrumental in Hōnen’s discovery of Shan-tao’s teaching of nembutsu. In Shinran’s lineage he was the sixth great teacher.

HonenFounder of the independent school of Pure Land (Jodo) Bud­dhism in Japan. He maintained that the traditional monastic practices were not ef­fective in the Last Age (mappo) nor universal for all people, as intended by Amida’s Vow. He incurred opposition from the establishment Buddhism and went into exile with several disciples, including Shinran. His major treatise, which was a manifesto of his teaching, was Senchaku hongan nembutsu shu (Treatise on the Nembutsu of the Select Primal Vow, abbreviated to Senchakushu).

jiriki(A)Self power; the consciousness that one achieves Enlightenment through one’s own effort. In Pure Land Buddhism it is considered a delusory understanding of the true nature of practice and faith, which are supported and enabled through Amida’s compassion. (B) One who is "liberated" while still in this "life"; a person who has attained to a state of spiritual perfection or self-realization before death; in contrast to videha-muktav, one who is liberated at the moment of death..

Jodo(A) Japanese term for "Pure Land." Though all Buddhas have their Pure Lands, the Land of Amida Buddha became the most well-known and desired in China and Japan because of its comprehensive nature, its popular propagation, and its ease of entry through recitation of his Name. (B) "pure land"; the untainted, transcendent realm created by the Buddha Amida (Amitabha in Sanskrit), into which his devotees aspire to be born in their next life.

Larger Sutra of Eternal LifeThe Sukhavati-vyuha Sutra which gives an account of Dharmakara (Jap. Hozo) Bodhisattva’s Vows and his eventual fulfillment of them. The central Sutra for Shinran and part of a threefold complex of Sutras which in­clude the Sutra of Contemplation and the Smaller Pure Land Sutra, which describes the Pure Land in detail. The title of the Sutra appears in various forms: Sutra of Adornment of the Realm of Bliss, Sutra of Immeasurable Life, or Sutra of Limitless Life.

MahayanaThe Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

mantra literally, "instrument of thought"; a word or phrase of divine origin, often including a Name of God, repeated by those initiated into its proper use as a means of salvation or liberation; see japa.

Meditation SutraA major Sutra of the complex of three Sutras of the Pure Land tradition initiated by Honen. This sutra was very influential in traditional Pure Land thought because of the system of meditations it describes, as well as the offer of salvation it provides to defiled people incapable of such practice. It gave the basis for the recitation of the Buddha’s Name as a means of birth into the Pure Land.

nembutsu(A) "The practice of reciting Namu-Amida-Butsu (the Name of Amida) is known as recitative nembutsu. There is also meditative nembutsu, which is a method of contemplation. Nembutsu is used synonymously with myogo, or the Name." (Unno) (B) "remembrance or mindfulness of the Buddha," based upon the repeated invocation of his Name; same as buddhānusmriti in Sanskrit and nien-fo in Chinese.

nirvanaIn Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

Original VowA term referring to the Vows of Amida, which indicate that he worked for aeons and aeons in the past. "Original" is also translated as "Primal," or "Primordial" to suggest an event in the timeless past of eternity.

prajnaAs (1) prājñā: The individual being in the state (avasthā ) of deep sleep wherein the activity of the mind temporarily ceases and an unconscious, but fleeting, union with Brahman occurs; As (2) Prajñā: A Sanskrit term that denotes transcendental wisdom. It is considered one of the most important pillars of Mahāyāna Buddhism, including Zen.

Pure Land"Translation from the Chinese ching-t’u (jodo in Japanese). The term as such is not found in Sanskrit, the closest being the phrase ‘purification of the Buddha Land.’ Shinran describes it as the ‘Land of Immeasurable Light,’ referring not to a place that emanates light, but a realization whenever one is illumined by the light of compassion." (Unno)

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

Shan-taoShan-tao (613-681) was an important scholar of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism whose teaching greatly affected Hōnen and Shinran through his commentary on the Sutra of Contemplation and systematization of Pure Land doctrine. He is credited with stressing the recitation of the nembutsu as the central act of Amida’s Vow and Pure Land devotion.

Shan-taoAn important scholar of Chinese Pure Land Buddhism whose teaching greatly affected Honen and Shinran through his commentary on the Sutra of Contemplation and systematization of Pure Land doctrine. He is credited with stressing the recitation of the nembutsu as the central act of Amida’s Vow and Pure Land devotion.

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

sutraLiterally, "thread;" a Hindu or Buddhist sacred text; in Hinduism, any short, aphoristic verse or collection of verses, often elliptical in style; in Buddhism, a collection of the discourses of the Buddha.

tariki(A) literally, "power of the other"; a Buddhist term for forms of spirituality that emphasize the importance of grace or celestial assistance, especially that of the Buddha Amida, as in the Pure Land schools; in contrast to jiriki. (B) Other Power; "The working of the boundless compassion of Amida Buddha, which nullifies all dualistic notions, including constructs of self and other. According to Shinran, ‘Other Power means to be free of any form of calculations (hakarai).’" (Unno)

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VasubandhuIn Shin Buddhism, the second great teacher in Shinran’s lineage. A major Mahayana teacher who laid the foundation of the Consciousness-Only school. In Pure Land tradition his commentary to the Larger Pure Land Sutra is a central text. To Zen Buddhism, he is the 21st Patriarch. Vasubandhu lived in fourth or fifth century (C.E.) India.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

psyche(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Om the most sacred syllable in Hinduism, containing all origination and dissolution; regarded as the "seed" of all mantras, its three mātrās or letters are taken to be symbolical of the Trimūrti, while the silence at its conclusion is seen as expressing the attainment of Brahma.

barakahSheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

MahayanaThe Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

sunnah(A) Wont; the model established by the Prophet Muḥammad, as transmitted in the ḥadīth. (B) "custom, way of acting"; in Islam, the norm established by the Prophet Muhammad, including his actions and sayings (see hadīth) and serving as a precedent and standard for the behavior of Muslims.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

nirvanaIn Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

Sakinah The root SKN includes the meanings of immobility (sukūn) and of habitation. The word is analogous to the Hebrew Shekīna (the Divine Glory dwelling in the ark of the Covenant). Note the Qur’ānic verse: “It is He who makes the Sakīnah descend into the hearts of the believers that they may acquire a new faith over their faith…” (48:4)

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

in divinisliterally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

Isa(A) literally, "possessing power," hence master; God understood as a personal being, as Creator and Lord; manifest in the Trimūrti as Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva. (B) lit. "the Lord of the Universe"; the personal God who manifests in the triple form of Brahmā (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), and Shiva (the Transformer); identical with saguna Brahman.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

MahayanaThe Larger Vehicle in contrast to the Hinayana, or Smaller Vehicle. It claimed to be more universal in opening Enlightenment to all beings, and inspired the emergence of the Pure Land teaching directed to ordinary beings—denoted as all beings in the ten directions. This tradition is characterized by a more complex philosophical development, an elaborate mythic and symbolic expression which emphasizes the cosmic character of the Buddha nature, and its inclusion of the key virtues of compassion and wisdom.

mimesisimitation, representation; in Poetics 1447 ab Aristotle includes all the fine arts under mimesis, among them epic, tragedy, comedy, painting and sculpture; the images produced by mimesis are not at all like photographic images; according to H.Armstrong, the classical Hellenic artists images are mimetically closer to those of the traditional arts of the East than to those of nineteenth-century Europe: ‘if we establish in our imagination the figure of the masked singing actor as our image of mimesis we shall not do too bad’ ( Platonic Mirrors, p.151); however, in a vocabulary used by Proclus the terms mimesis and mimema are usually reserved for art of an inferior type, though Proclus says that ‘the congenital vehicles ( ochemata) imitate ( mimeitai) the lives of the souls’ ( Elements of theology 209) and ‘each of the souls perpetually attendand upon gods, imitating its divine soul, is sovereign over a number of particular souls’ (ibid.,204).

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

psyche(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VedaThe sacred scriptures of Hinduism; regarded by the orthodox (āstika) as divine revelation (śruti) and comprising: (1) the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva Saṃhitās (collections of hymns); (2) the Brāhmanas (priestly treatises); (3) the Āranyakas (forest treatises); and (4) the Upaniṣāds (philosophical and mystical treatises); they are divided into a karma-kāṇḍa portion dealing with ritual action and a jñāna-kāṇḍa portion dealing with knowledge.

yamaIn Sanskrit, “restraint”, "self control", whether on the bodily or psychic level. in Hinduism, yama is the first step in the eightfold path of the yogin, which consists in resisting all inclinations toward violence, lying, stealing, sexual activity, and greed. See niyama. (This term should not be confused with the proper name Yama, which refers to a figure from the early Vedas, first a king and then later a deity who eventually conducts departed souls to the underworld and is mounted on a buffalo.)

Bodhidharmathe 28th patriarch of Buddhism and the 1st patriarch of Zen, he is said to have brought the meditation school of Buddhism to China around 520 C.E. A legendary figure whose face is painted by many Zen masters. (His original name was Bodhi-dhana.)

BodhisattvaLiterally, "enlightenment-being;" in Mahāyāna Buddhism, one who postpones his own final enlightenment and entry into Nirvāṇa in order to aid all other sentient beings in their quest for Buddhahood.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

theologiadivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VasubandhuIn Shin Buddhism, the second great teacher in Shinran’s lineage. A major Mahayana teacher who laid the foundation of the Consciousness-Only school. In Pure Land tradition his commentary to the Larger Pure Land Sutra is a central text. To Zen Buddhism, he is the 21st Patriarch. Vasubandhu lived in fourth or fifth century (C.E.) India.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

barakahSheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

hypostases literally, "substances" (singular, hypostasis); in Eastern Christian theology, a technical term for the three "Persons" of the Trinity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are distinct hypostases sharing a single ousia, or essence.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

in divinisliterally, "in or among divine things"; within the divine Principle; the plural form is used insofar as the Principle comprises both Para-Brahma, Beyond-Being or the Absolute, and Apara-Brahma, Being or the relative Absolute.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

kshatriyaa member of the second highest of the four Hindu castes; a warrior or prince. (Also includes politicians, officers, and civil authorities.) The distinctive quality of the kshatriya is a combative and noble nature that tends toward glory and heroism.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

guruspiritual guide or Master. Also, a preceptor, any person worthy of veneration; weighty; Jupiter. The true function of a guru is explained in The Guru Tradition. Gurukula is the household or residence of a preceptor. A brahmacārin stays with his guru to be taught the Vedas, the Vedāngas and other subjects this is gurukulavāsa.

humanismThe intellectual viewpoint increasingly prevalent in the West since the time of the Renaissance; it replaced the traditional Christian view of God as the center of all things by a belief in man as the measure of all things.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

psyche(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

baliThis is also one of the "panca-mahāyajnas" and vaiśvadeva or bhūtayajna rite to be performed by the householder. In this rite food is offered with the chanting of mantras to birds and beasts and outcastes. Bali is what is directly offered while "āhuti" is what is offered in the fire.

materia prima "first or prime matter"; in Platonic cosmology, the undifferentiated and primordial substance serving as a "receptacle" for the shaping force of divine forms or ideas; universal potentiality.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

rajasIn Hinduism, the second of the three gunas, or cosmic forces that result from creation. Rajas literally refers to "colored" or "dim" spaces, and is the guna whose energy is characterized by passion, emotion, variability, urgency, and activity. In the Vedas, the word is also used to designate the division of the world which encompasses the vapors and mists of the atmosphere, and which is below "the ethereal spaces."

tamasIn Hinduism and Buddhism, the lowest of the three cosmic qualities (gunas) that are a result of the creation of matter; tamas literally means "darkness" and this cosmic quality or energy is characterized by error, ignorance, heaviness, inertia, etc. Its darkness is related to the gloom of hell. In the Samkhya system of Hindu philosophy, tamas is seen as a form of ignorance (avidya) that lulls the spiritual being away from its true nature.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

Ruh In Sufism this word includes the following meanings: 1. The Divine, and therefore uncreated Spirit (ar-Rūḥ al-ilāhī), also called ar-Rūḥ al-Qudus, the Holy Spirit; 2. The Universal, created, Spirit (ar-Rūḥ al-kullī); 3. The individual Spirit, or rather the Spirit polarized in relation to an individual; 4. The vital spirit, intermediate between soul and body.

shrutiLiterally, "what is heard;" in Hindu tradition, a category of sacred writings understood to be the direct revelation of eternal Truth, including the Vedas, the Saṃhitās, the Brāhmaṇas, the Āraṇyakas and the Upanishads (Upaniṣads); in contrast to smriti (smṛti).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

ksatriyaa member of the second highest of the four Hindu castes; a warrior or prince. (Also includes politicians, officers, and civil authorities.) The distinctive quality of the kshatriya is a combative and noble nature that tends toward glory and heroism.

psyche(usually transcribed as psyche): soul; breath of life, life-stuff; Homer distinguishes between a free soul as a soul of the dead, corresponding with psuche (and still regarded as an eidolon), and body souls, corresponding with thumos, noos and menos: following the Egyptian theological patterns, the Pythagoreans constituted the psuche as the reflection of the unchanging and immortal principles; from Plato onwards, psuchai are no longer regarded as eidola, phantoms or doubles of the body, but rather the human body is viewed as the perishable simulacrum of an immaterial and immortal soul; there are different degrees of soul (or different souls), therefore anything that is alive has a soul (Aristotle De anima 414b32); in Phaedrus 248b the soul is regarded as something to be a separate, self-moving and immortal entity (cf.Proclus Elements of Theology 186); Psuche is the third hupostasis of Plotinus.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

tirthaA ford; a place of pilgrimage especially one situated on a river, lake or the shores of the sea; a preceptor or holy personage; the word is also used to denote the sacred water used in the worship of a deity or in any other ceremony.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

VedaThe sacred scriptures of Hinduism; regarded by the orthodox (āstika) as divine revelation (śruti) and comprising: (1) the Ṛg, Sāma, Yajur, and Atharva Saṃhitās (collections of hymns); (2) the Brāhmanas (priestly treatises); (3) the Āranyakas (forest treatises); and (4) the Upaniṣāds (philosophical and mystical treatises); they are divided into a karma-kāṇḍa portion dealing with ritual action and a jñāna-kāṇḍa portion dealing with knowledge.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

yamaIn Sanskrit, “restraint”, "self control", whether on the bodily or psychic level. in Hinduism, yama is the first step in the eightfold path of the yogin, which consists in resisting all inclinations toward violence, lying, stealing, sexual activity, and greed. See niyama. (This term should not be confused with the proper name Yama, which refers to a figure from the early Vedas, first a king and then later a deity who eventually conducts departed souls to the underworld and is mounted on a buffalo.)

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Advaita "non-dualist" interpretation of the Vedānta; Hindu doctrine according to which the seeming multiplicity of things is regarded as the product of ignorance, the only true reality being Brahman, the One, the Absolute, the Infinite, which is the unchanging ground of appearance.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

samkhyaLiterally, "enumeration, calculation;" Hindu cosmological teaching in which nature is understood to result from the union of puruṣa (spirit) and prakṛti (matter); one of the six orthodox darśanas, or perspectives, of classical Hinduism.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

adam In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

barakahSheikh al-barakah is a phrase also used of a master who bears the spiritual influence of the Prophet or who has realized that spiritual presence which is only a virtuality in the case of most initiates.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

modernismThe predominant post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment worldview of Western civilization marked by rationalism, scientism, and humanism. In the Muslim world, it refers to those individuals and movements who have sought to adopt Western ideas and values from the nineteenth century onwards in response to Western domination and imperialism.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

archebeginning, starting point, authority, government, heart, principle; archai are understood as the first principles by Neoplatonists; the term archetupos, an archetype, is used already by Plotinus in a sense of the divine paradigm or the noetic model of the manifested entity.

eroslove, sometimes personified as a deity, daimon, or cosmogonical, pedagogical and soteriological force, manifested in the process of demiurgy and within domain of providence; for Plato, philosophy is a sort of erotic madness ( mania), because Eros, though implying need, can inspire us with the love of wisdom; Diotima in Plato’s Symposium describes education in erotics as an upward journey or ascent towards the perfect noetic Beauty; Plotinus uses the union of lowers as a symbol of the soul’s union with the One ( Enn.VI.7.34.14-16); Proclus distinguishes two forms of love: 1) ascending love which urges lower principles to aspire towards their superiors, 2) descending or providential love ( eros pronoetikos) which obligates the superiors to care for their procucts and transmit divine grace ( In Alcib.54-56); for Dionysius the Areopagite, who follows Proclus, the eros ekstatikos becomes the unifying factor of the cosmos.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

theologydivine science, theology, logos about the gods, considered to be the essence of teletai; for Aristotle, a synonim of metaphysics or first philosophy ( prote philosophia) in contrast with physics ( Metaph.1026a18); however, physics ( phusiologia) sometimes is called as a kind of theology (Proclus In Tim.I.217.25); for Neoplatonists, among the ancient theologians ( theologoi) are Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and other divinely inspired poets, the creators of theogonies and keepers of sacred rites.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

karmaaction; the effects of past actions; the law of cause and effect ("as a man sows, so shall he reap"); of three kinds: (1) sanchita karma: actions of the past that have yet to bear fruit in the present life; (2) prārabdha karma: actions of the past that bear fruit in the present life; and (3) āgāmi karma :actions of the present that have still, by the law of cause and effect, to bear fruit in the future.

nirvanaIn Buddhism (and Hinduism), ultimate liberation from samsara (the cycles of rebirths or the flow of cosmic manifestation), resulting in absorption in the Absolute; the extinction of the fires of passion and the resulting, supremely blissful state of liberation from attachment and egoism.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

adam In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

taxisorder, series; any level of reality, constituted by seira in which the distinctive property of a particular god or henad is sucessively mirrored; the chain of being proceeds from simplicity to complexity and subsequently from complexity to simplicity; the hierarchy of taxeis establish the planes of being or world-orders ( diakosmoi).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

ascesis(A) "exercise, practice, training," as of an athlete; a regimen of self-denial, especially one involving fasting, prostrations, and other bodily disciplines. (B) in ancient philosophy, this term designates not an ‘asceticism’, but spiritual exercises, therefore philosophia is understood not as a theory of knowledge but as a lived wisdom, a way of living according to intellect ( nous); an askesis includes remembrance of God, the ‘watch of the heart’, or vigilance ( nepsis),prosoche, or attention to the beauty of the soul, the examination of our conscience and knowledge of ourselves.

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

adam In Sufism this expression includes on the one hand the positive sense of non-manifestation, of a principial state beyond existence or even beyond Being, and on the other hand a negative sense of privation, of relative nothingness.

Vedanta"End or culmination of the Vedas," a designation for the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds) as the last portion ("end") of the Vedas; also one of the six orthodox (āstika) schools of Hindu philosophy who have their starting point in the texts of the Upanishads (Upaniṣāds), the Brahma-Sūtras (of Bādarāyana Vyāsa), and the Bhagavad Gītā ; over time, Vedānta crystallized into three distinct schools: Advaita (non-dualism), associated with Shankara(ca.788-820 C.E.); Viśiṣṭādvaita (qualified non-dualism), associated with Rāmānuja(ca.1055-1137 C.E.); and Dvaita (dualism), associated with Madhva (ca.1199-1278 C.E.); see "Advaita."

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

philosophialove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

RamaIn Hinduism, one of the names by which to call God. In sacred history, Rama was the hero king of the epic Ramayana, and is one of the ten avatars of Vishnu. The term is also a form of address among sadhus

sriLiterally, "splendor, beauty, venerable one;" an honorific title set before the name of a deity or eminent human being; also a name of Lakshmi (Lakṣmī), the consort of Vishnu (Viṣṇu) and the goddess of beauty and good fortune.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

tariqaLiterally, “path” in Arabic. In exoteric Islam, it is a virtual synonym for sharî‘ah, equivalent to the “straight path” (mentioned in the Fatihah, the first verse of the Koran) that a believer must follow. However, in esoteric Islam, Sufism, tariqah refers to the mystical path which leads from the observance of the sharî‘ah to self-realization in God. In Sufism it also refers to a Sufi brotherhood.

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.

abd(A) In religious language, designates the worshiper, and, more generally, the creature as dependent on his Lord (rabb. (B) "servant" or "slave"; as used in Islam, the servant or worshiper of God in His aspect of Rabb or "Lord".

gnosis(A) "knowledge"; spiritual insight, principial comprehension, divine wisdom.(B) knowledge; gnosis is contrasted with doxa (opinion) by Plato; the object of gnosis is to on, reality or being, and the fully real is the fully knowable ( Rep.477a); the Egyptian Hermetists made distinction between two types of knowledge: 1) science ( episteme), produced by reason ( logos), and 2) gnosis, produced by understanding and faith ( Corpus Hermeticum IX); therefore gnosis is regarded as the goal of episteme (ibid.X.9); the -idea that one may ‘know God’ ( gnosis theou) is very rare in the classical Hellenic literature, which rather praises episteme and hieratic vision, epopteia, but is common in Hermetism, Gnosticism and early Christianity; following the Platonic tradition (especially Plotinus and Porphyry), Augustine introduced a distinction between knowledge and wisdom, scientia and sapientia, claiming that the fallen soul knows only scientia, but before the Fall she knew sapientia ( De Trinitate XII).

ideain non-technical use the term refers to the visual aspect of anything; for Plato and Platonists, it is the highest noetic entity, the eternal unchanging Form, the archetype of the manifested material thing; in Plato, idea is a synonim of eidos, but in Neoplatonism these two terms have a slightly different meaning.

Isa(A) literally, "possessing power," hence master; God understood as a personal being, as Creator and Lord; manifest in the Trimūrti as Brahmā, Vishnu, and Shiva. (B) lit. "the Lord of the Universe"; the personal God who manifests in the triple form of Brahmā (the Creator), Vishnu (the Sustainer), and Shiva (the Transformer); identical with saguna Brahman.

logos(A) "word, reason"; in Christian theology, the divine, uncreated Word of God (cf. John 1:1); the transcendent Principle of creation and revelation. (B) the basic meaning is ‘something said’, ‘account’; the term is used in explanation and definition of some kind of thing, but also means reason, measure, proportion, analogy, word, speech, discourse, discursive reasoning, noetic apprehension of the first principles; the demiurgic Logos (like the Egyptian Hu, equated with Thoth, the tongue of Ra, who transforms the Thoughts of the Heart into spoken and written Language, thus creating and articulating the world as a script and icon of the gods) is the intermediary divine power: as an image of the noetic cosmos, the physical cosmos is regarded as a multiple Logos containing a plurality of individual logoi ( Enn.IV.3.8.17-22); in Plotinus, Logos is not a separate hupostasis, but determines the relation of any hupostasis to its source and its products, serving as the formative principle from which the lower realities evolve; the external spech ( logos prophorikos) constitutes the external expression of internal thought ( logos endiathetos).

Nur Particularly the uncreated Divine Light, which includes all manifestation and is identified with Existence, considered as a principle. “God is the Light (Nūr) of the heavens and the earth…” (Qur’ān 24:35).

philosophylove of wisdom; the intellectual and ‘erotic’ path which leads to virtue and knowledge; the term itself perhaps is coined by Pythagoras; the Hellenic philosophia is a prolongation, modification and ‘modernization’ of the Egyptian and Near Eastern sapiential ways of life; philosophia cannot be reduced to philosophical discourse; for Aristotle, metaphysics is prote philosophia, or theologike, but philosophy as theoria means dedication to the bios theoretikos, the life of contemplation – thus the philosophical life means the participation in the divine and the actualization of the divine in the human through the personal askesis and inner transformation; Plato defines philosophy as a training for death ( Phaed.67cd); the Platonic philosophia helps the soul to become aware of its own immateriality, it liberates from passions and strips away everything that is not truly itself; for Plotinus, philosophy does not wish only ‘to be a discourse about objects, be they even the highest, but it wishes actually to lead the soul to a living, concrete union with the Intellect and the Good’; in the late Neoplatonism, the ineffable theurgy is regarded as the culmination of philosophy.

shariah Every divine Messenger (rasūl) brings a new sharī‘ah, according with the cyclic and human conditions. Sharī‘ah is opposed to Ḥaqīqah, i.e. the sacred Law to the divine Truth or Reality. The sacred Laws are different one from another, but their Divine Reality is always the same.

sophia(A)wisdom; the term covers all spheres of human activity – all ingenious invention aimed at satisfying one’s material, political and religious needs; Hephaistos (like his prototypes – the Ugaritian Kothar-wa-Hasis and the Egyptian Ptah) is poluphronos, very wise, klutometis, renowned in wisdom – here ‘wisdom’ means not simply some divine quality, but wondrous skill, cleverness, technical ability, magic power; in Egypt all sacred wisdom (especially, knowledge of the secret divine names and words of power, hekau, or demiurgic and theurgic mantras, which are able to restore one’s true divine identity) was under the patronage of Thoth; in classical Greece, the inspird poet, the lawgiver, the polititian, the magician, the natural philosopher and sophist – all claimed to wisdom, and indeed ‘philosophy’ is the love of wisdom, philo-sophia, i.e. a way of life in effort to achieve wisdom as its goal; the ideal of sophos (sage) in the newly established Platonic paideia is exemplified by Socrates; in Neoplatonism, the theoretical wisdom (though the term sophia is rarely used) means contemplation of the eternal Forms and becoming like nous, or a god; there are the characteristic properties which constitute the divine nature and which spread to all the divine classes: good ( agathotes), wisdom ( sophia) and beauty ( kallos). (B) "wisdom"; in Jewish and Christian tradition, the Wisdom of God, often conceived as feminine (cf. Prov. 8).

Tradition(as the term is used by "Traditionalists" and in the "Perennial Philosopy":) Divine Revelation and the unfolding and development of its sacred content, in time and space, such that the forms of society and civilization maintain a "vertical" connection to the meta-historical, transcendental substance from which revelation itself derives.